CINeMA: Conditional Implicit Neural Multi-Modal Atlas for a Spatio-Temporal Representation of the Perinatal Brain
This provides a powerful tool for advancing brain research in perinatal stages, particularly for pathologies with scarce data, though it is an incremental improvement over existing deep learning-based methods.
The paper tackles the challenge of creating high-resolution, spatio-temporal brain atlases for perinatal brains, especially in low-data settings like pathologies, by introducing CINeMA, which reduces atlas construction times from days to minutes and surpasses state-of-the-art methods in accuracy, efficiency, and versatility.
Magnetic resonance imaging of fetal and neonatal brains reveals rapid neurodevelopment marked by substantial anatomical changes unfolding within days. Studying this critical stage of the developing human brain, therefore, requires accurate brain models-referred to as atlases-of high spatial and temporal resolution. To meet these demands, established traditional atlases and recently proposed deep learning-based methods rely on large and comprehensive datasets. This poses a major challenge for studying brains in the presence of pathologies for which data remains scarce. We address this limitation with CINeMA (Conditional Implicit Neural Multi-Modal Atlas), a novel framework for creating high-resolution, spatio-temporal, multimodal brain atlases, suitable for low-data settings. Unlike established methods, CINeMA operates in latent space, avoiding compute-intensive image registration and reducing atlas construction times from days to minutes. Furthermore, it enables flexible conditioning on anatomical features including GA, birth age, and pathologies like ventriculomegaly (VM) and agenesis of the corpus callosum (ACC). CINeMA supports downstream tasks such as tissue segmentation and age prediction whereas its generative properties enable synthetic data creation and anatomically informed data augmentation. Surpassing state-of-the-art methods in accuracy, efficiency, and versatility, CINeMA represents a powerful tool for advancing brain research. We release the code and atlases at https://github.com/m-dannecker/CINeMA.